So,
why Native plants only? It
is the only way to help steward our inclusion in a landscape,
creating a sense of place. Simply,
it allows our inclusion in a landscape to be functional without
detriment to every other player in or from that landscape. Humans
need not feel bad about having desires, just bad about perpetuating
ignorance as an acceptable allowance to facilitate those desires.

Humans
are selfish. I am selfish. And as a result, the
consequences of my actions in my habitat are real for the habitat I
am in.
Dr. Seuss said it best in The
Lorax,
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going
to get better. It’s not”.

...I
actually do believe
that, in an ideal world, every residential and managed landscape
would contain some amount of plants for food, vast amounts of native
plants thriving in robust ecosystems all around the buildings (or
even on them), and no other plants. So. There. I’ve said it. That’s
my ideal, and I’m sticking to it.

Are
you now asking, “But how could this ever work? What about my
daffodils? My lilacs, dahlias, iris and sedum? What about my clients’
need for season-long color and pest-free foliage?” In
answer I can only say that, for me, achieving my ideal involves
giving highest priority to the fact that plants have a much more
important purpose than to entertain and serve humans.

Plants
support all life on the planet. They are the foundation of complex
food webs everywhere, growing in intricate relationships of support
and competition with other organisms. Most of the time we don’t
comprehend these interactions, even when they’re right in front of
us. Do we know which plants are doing what, for whom, and why, and
what will happen if they’re not there? Essentially no, we don’t.
Do we know that non-native plants are ecologically equivalent to
natives? On the contrary, we know that usually they
are not. So
if we select plants primarily to satisfy our many human-centered
goals, we are ignoring plants’ essential role on Earth.

Planning
to Achieve the Ideal

Living
a native-plant ideal, in contrast to the standard gardening approach,
involves taking myself out of the center of the picture. Not out of
the picture entirely, no. Just out of the center.